Customer Reviews

The Attorney

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Power house attorney Paul Madriani and his daughter Sarah have moved to San Diego so that they can live closer to his beloved Susan McKay and her two daughters. Susan is the director of Children's Protective Service, a fierce advocate of children's rights. Her archenemy is Zolanda Suade, a fanatical self-appointed child advocate.

Jonah Hale retains Paul to find his beloved granddaughter Amanda, who has been abducted by her own mother Jessica with the help of Zolanda. When Jonah realizes that the law cannot help him or protect Amanda from her uncaring abusive mother, he vanishes. During his disappearance, someone kills Zolanda. The police arrest Jonah who has no alibi. Paul tries to help his client, but it is Susan who constantly crosses the legal line that leads everyone into danger.

Steve Martini has written a legal thriller that will stun everyone with its sucker punch ending. THE ATTORNEY returns Paul Madriani to his fans in a story line that is his most suspenseful and tragic to date. Steve and Susan act believable even when she propels them to choose justice over the law. Mr. Martini needs to bring back this delightful cast in future novels that are sure to be thought provoking and exciting.

Harriet Klausner

Martini was wise to go back to his "bread and butter" protagonist, Paul Madriani. I always enjoyed this character and I was dismayed at such books as Martini's "Critical Mass," in which Martini discarded both Madriani and the legal thriller genre. Much of "The Attorney" is exciting and compelling. Paul Madriani, the hero of the title, tries to help Jonah Hale, an older man who has made a great deal of money in a lottery. Hale's granddaughter is missing, along with her drug-addicted mother. Along the way, Madriani encounters complications relating to his lover, Susan, who works with abused children, and Paul is nearly killed by a Mexican drug lord. Eventually, a key characters is murdered and Paul is the defendant's attorney at trial. As always, Martini is very good at writing courtroom sequences. As compelling as some of these courtroom scenes are, the book drags on for over 400 pages. The most problematic element of the book, however, is the tacked-on ending. Martini loves surprise endings. He delivers the surprise at the very end of the book and it simply does not hold water. There are plot holes at the end that are enormous and the author never plugs up the holes. I still enjoyed much of the book, but Martini should be more careful in making the plot more coherent. Surprise endings work only when they make sense.

Martini has brought Paul Madriani, one of his best characters, back. Though it starts slow, if you stay with it you won't be disappointed. No one dies for the first 100 pages, and that is what makes this mystery so engrossing, one twist after another until a most unexpected conclusion. Even the characters and the sub-plots don't slow it down. The romance with long time love, Susan, and their three girls rings true, and Paul's law partner, Harry give this plot enough juice to be worth the effort. I always expect a lot from a Steve Martini book, and he seldom falters. Just keep bringing Paul back, he's real.

I hope Martini doesn't turn into one of those best selling novelists who begins to believe his own publicity and lets his storytelling slide.

This book is not representative of the fine work that Martini has done in the past. It's almost like he had to slap a plot together but couldn't decide which way to go, so he ended up all over the map. And Mexico? What's up with that?

I'm glad Madrini's moved south...the change seems to suit him. Maybe Martini will conjure up a better story the next time.

This book isn't bad enough to keep me from reading more Martini...I'll just be a little less enthusiatic for a while.

WOW - these Paul Madriani books are pretty exciting... and this one is no exception... The plot is fairly interesting, full of twists and turns about child custody and ethical issues. But I didn't find Paul's relationship with Susan very real - her kids, for example, have no names, they are "twins", and Paul's relationship with his daughter is virtually non-existent... Susan and Paul seem to be in it for the sex(and we do have a couple of nice sex scenes, but where does he get off dumping his kid there for days on end and why does Susan mysteriously have time to take care of her when she seems pretty tapped out herself?- Susan's sense of ethics are pretty strange, and much of the plot revolves around this...the climax in Mexico is beyond believable in so many ways, and the "surprise" ending is a bit of a steal from Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent but if you like a page turner.....

Well, it's nice to have the familiar cast of characters back. I was disapointed by the move to San Diego. Sacramento (aka "River City") was a more interesting & realistic locale for Martini. It was obvious he didn't know the area as well, it had little to no detailed local flavor, which was a plus in the prior Madriani books.

The story was ok, not his best by any means. Martini used to hook you in with his interesting characters. Here it was hard to warm up to Jonah, you don't really care if he is acquitted or convicted. In Martini's better books, the main characters (Madriani, Hinds, etc) reacted to the plot and it's central character, the accused, who you felt for and got to know. Here it seemed reverse engineered, somewhat contrived. The plot was a bit slow to develop and many of the characters were under-developed, you just never got to know them very well.

However, he's still the master of the court room dialogue. No other current "legal thriller" author holds a candle to Martini in this regard. He has the ability to explain trial strategies & why questions are asked or why they are asked in certain ways, in simple straight forward language. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand what his lawyers are doing in the courtroom or why they are doing it.

That part of this book alone, makes it a worthwhile read. I think that Martini should stay in the courtroom.

Paul Madriani has moved to San Diego, and as usual becomes involved in another homicide case. Matini keeps the reader in the dark about the killer until the climax, dropping a few clues here and there, including a few red herrings. The courtroom scenes are solid, and form the heart of the novel, but the mystery will keep readers interested until the past page.

Martini at his best! Whether you are familiar with the Madriani character or not, you get to know him (and the other great characters in this book) quickly. And, if you're like me, you will be unable to work, eat or sleep until you finish the wild ride that takes you through the last chapter! Thoroughly enjoyable! Looking forward to the next one!

This is an easy enough read, but I figured out whodunnit almost immediately, and this is never good for a book like this. The court room scenes are entertaining enough, but no better than many other in this genre.

Overall, I was disappointed.

I tried for several weeks to get into this book, and I simply couldn't do it. Each chapter would invariably cause me to go back and re-read a paragraph, and each time I concluded that the editor should have donea better job. Perhaps Mr. Martini has tired of re-introducing the same protagonist in each Paul Madriani novel, but I found the writing so poor that I was unable to get the book moving.

The "sensual" portions are cheesy in a "made-for-TV-movie" kind of way, and he often refers to events in an ambiguous fashion. For instance, he describes his motivation for moving to the west coast and then introduces his daughter as "between elementary school and junior high and not looking forward to the move." Several paragraphs later, he recalls his daughter trying to convince him that they _should_ move to the west coast. Re-read the previous page to determine that the move which she was dreading was _the_move_to_junior_high_... Just poor writing, in my opinion, and each succeeding paragraph brought with it another similarly annoying issue.

I just finished reading Critical Mass, and I thought it was a splendid read. Not unlike the previous Paul Madriani novels, I couldn't put the book down. The Attorney, sadly, I can't bring myself to pick back up. Pick it up yourself at your own risk.